Tag Archive for John Tunheim

Federal judge John Tunheim, former chair of the Assassination Records Review Boad

[Reposted from December 2013, this news report is relevant to the oral arguments in Morley v. CIA that will be heard in Washington federal court on March 19, 2018.]

Two members of an independent civilian review panel that oversaw the release of the government’s JFK assassination files say the CIA misled them about the records of deceased undercover officer George Joannides.

In a piece for the Boston Herald, Judge John Tunheim, former chair of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) and Thomas Samoluk, former deputy director of the ARRB, said this: Read more

The backlash continues. Trump’s much ballyhooed release of JFK files is drawing more criticism for being late and incomplete.

“I just don’t think there is anything in these records that require keeping them secret now,” John Tunheim, who from 1992 to 1998 chaired a congressionally established board that reviewed all the files on the assassination, told POLITICO in a telephone interview Friday. He is now a U.S. district judge in Minnesota.

“I think it’s time to release everything” Tunheim said. “We didn’t really protect that much. We never protected an entire document, except for those that we didn’t think that were relevant at all. It might have been some kind of intelligence gathering method that was still being used that they didn’t want the public to know about.”

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The coverage of the first batch newly-released JFK assassination records in Politico, the Washington Post, WhoWhatWhy, AlterNet and other national publication confirms the public interest in–and historical importance of– the government’s long secret files about the murder of President Kennedy in 1963.

But the documented fact, first reported in JFK Facts, that a batch of CIA records about suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald has gone missing since 1997, underscores the need for congressional legislation to insure that the goal of full disclosure is achieved.

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Federal judge John Tunheim, former chair of the Assassination Records Review Board.

Judge John Tunheim will speak about the 25th anniversary of the JFK Records Act at the National Press Club in Washington DC on March 16.

Tunheim, federal judge in Minneapolis, is the former chair of the independent civilian board that implemented the JFK Records Act and released some four million pages of assassination-related records since 1998.

These new JFK files have deepened and clarified the story of how the President John F. Kennedy was shot to death on November 22, 1963 and why no one was ever brought to justice for his wrongful death. Read more

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John R. Tunheim, the federal judge in Minnesota who served from 1994 to 1998 as the chairman of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), says in a television program to be aired this month that while the Warren Commission “did a thorough job,” the investigation of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 was “somewhat primitive” and riddled with “too many holes.”

There is a body of documents that the CIA is still protecting, which should be released. Relying on inaccurate representations made by the CIA in the mid-1990s, the Review Board decided that records related to a deceased CIA agent named George Joannides were not relevant to the assassination. Subsequent work by researchers, using other records that were released by the board, demonstrates that these records should be made public.

Judge John Tunheim, former chair of the Asssasination Records Review Board (ARRB) and Thomas Samoluk, former deputy director of the ARRB.

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In yesterday’s Boston Globe, Bryan Bender reported that Judge John Tunheim, former chair of a civilian review panel in charge of declassifying the government’s JFK assassination records, has called on the CIA to release all of its files on the late George Joannides, a deceased CIA officer involved in the events of 1963 and its confused investigatory aftermath. Read more

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Federal Judge John Tunheim will speak Thursday in Stillwater, Minnesota, about the challenge of declassifying government records related to the death of President Kennedy, according to the Forest Lake Times. It is rare opportunity to hear from the leader of the last effort to force the government to make public long-secret JFK records. Read more

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Federal judge John Tunheim, chair of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) from 1994 to 1998, said last week the government has released virtually all of its assassination-related records–a claim contradicted by a publicly available online database of the National Archives.